God’s Word Upholds: Construction and Deconstruction in the Word Part 1: The Physical Universe

Have you ever considered how everything is held together, not just in your life, but the entire universe? Materialists would point to weak and strong magnetic and gravitational forces as the primary reason for the physical bonds of the universe, but is there something deeper than just physical forces that holds everything in its place? Is the very matter of the span of creation being upheld by something unseen and far more powerful?

Who remembers high school or college science class, more specifically physical science? What kinds of things did you learn? In the world we can observe, it seems that everything is held together by physical forces such as magnetism and gravity. If you go all the way down to the atomic level, you see electrons spinning around a nucleus of protons and neutrons. You can even work your way down to subatomic particles such as bosons, muons, and gluons and see these revolving around things, being held together by these nuclear forces. All of this attraction is based on objects having mass and positive/negative charges. So, if we continue down and down and down, we see smaller and smaller components of matter being held together by weaker and weaker forces, upon which the fabric of the physical world seems to rest. In fact, there may be sub sub atomic particles that have not yet been discovered. Where will it end?

Now, let’s go up. We live on Earth. Earth has mass as well and is made up of uncountable atomic and subatomic particles. But, around the Earth, other things revolve, don’t they? Then, you move back and begin to see that the Earth itself spins around the Sun. move farther back and notice that all the plants and their moons move around the Sun as well. Pull back farther and you’ll observe that our very solar system is in a spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy, revolving around the galaxy’s nucleus. And, if you could go even farther back, you’d see that our galaxy is merely one of trillions of galaxies, spreading across light years of space! It’s an amazing universe God has made!

Just look at some of the Biblical passages that describe the universe in all its beauty and majesty. Psalm 19:1-6 refers to the Sun and the “tent” under which it is set, referring to space. Space being stretched out like a tent is referenced many times in scripture. Psalm 104:2, Is 40:22 … This is consistent with what astronomers and physicists see in the universe today. Our universe is literally stretching away in every direction, the fabric being pulled in every direction simultaneously as if it were a balloon being blown up…1 Cor 15:40-41 “There are heavenly bodies and earthly bodies, but the glory of the heavenly is of one kind, and the glory of the earthly is of another. There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars; for star differs from star in glory.” Here’s another view from the heavens where we see the immeasurable variety of creation and all its glory. No two stars are alike just as no two snowflakes or animals or humans are exactly alike.